(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced that a hearing will be held on Thursday, July 10 before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to confer about the emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. IRS (No. 1:13-cv-1559)).

The IRS recently claimed to have “lost” the emails.

Date: Thursday, July 10

Time: 11 a.m. ET

Location: Courtroom 24A

U.S. District Court

333 Constitution Ave NW

District of Columbia

The emails Judicial Watch has sought since May 2013 cover portions of the same period for which the IRS on June 13, 2014, notified the House Committee on Ways and Means were lost or destroyed. Yet, according to the Motion for Status Conference, the IRS failed to notify either Judicial Watch or the court concerning the “lost” emails:

Plaintiff’s FOIA requests and the Committee’s request indisputably seek the same emails of Lois Lerner and the other IRS officials, including Nikole Flax, from January 1, 2010 to the present. Despite the obvious relevance, IRS has still not notified the Court or Plaintiff of the destruction of emails and whether the same issues relating to production of emails of Lois Lerner or the other six IRS officials exist in this lawsuit. Plaintiff only learned of the destroyed records on June 13, 2014, when the news media reported on the existence of IRS’s letter to Congress about the status of the emails.

On October 21, 2013, Judicial Watch released email exchangesbetween Lerner and enforcement attorneys at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicating that the IRS provided detailed, confidential information concerning the tax exempt application status and returns of conservative groups to the FEC in violation of federal law. Included with the email exchanges were IRS questionnaires to a conservative group that contained questions of a hostile nature. The emails were produced to Judicial Watch by the FEC in response to an August 9, 2013, FOIA request. None of these FEC emails with Lerner have been produced by the IRS.